Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [83]
“Jesus Christ,” said Ubriaco. “This better be a pretty good job you got to offer. I like what I do.”
“You’ll see,” said the lawyer.
“I broke a date for you monkeys,” said Ubriaco.
“Yes—and Mr. Leen broke a date for you,” said the lawyer. “His daughter is having her debut at the Waldorf tonight, and he won’t be there. He’ll be talking to you gentlemen instead.”
“Fucking crazy,” said Ubriaco. Nobody else had anything to say. As we crossed Central Park to the East Side, Ubriaco spoke again. “Fucking debut,” he said.
Clewes said to me, “You’re the only one who knows everybody else here. You’re in the middle of this thing somehow.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said. “It’s my dream.”
And we were delivered without further conversation to the penthouse dwelling of Arpad Leen. We were told by the lawyer to leave our shoes in the foyer. It was the custom of the house. I, of course, was already in my stocking feet.
Ubriaco asked if Leen was a Japanese, since the Japanese commonly took off their shoes indoors.
The lawyer assured him that Leen was a Caucasian, but that he had grown up in Fiji, where his parents ran a general store. As I would find out later, Leen’s father was a Hungarian Jew, and his mother was a Greek Cypriot. His parents met when they were working on a Swedish cruise ship in the late twenties. They jumped ship in Fiji, and started the store.
Leen himself looked like an idealized Plains Indian to me. He could have been a movie star. And he came out into the foyer in a striped silk dressing gown and black socks and garters. He still hoped to make it to his daughter’s debut.
Before he introduced himself to us, he had to tell the lawyer an incredible piece of news. “You know what the son of a bitch is in prison for?” he said. “Treason! And we’re supposed to get him out and give him a job. Treason! How do you get somebody out of jail who’s committed treason? How do we give him even a lousy job without every patriot in the country raising hell?”
The lawyer didn’t know.
“Well,” said Leen, “what the hell. Get me Roy Cohn again. I wish I were back in Nashville.”
This last remark alluded to Leen’s having been the leading publisher of country music in Nashville, Tennessee, before his little empire was swallowed up by RAMJAC. His old company, in fact, was the nucleus of the Down Home Records Division of RAMJAC.
Now he looked us over and he shook his head in wonderment. We were a freakish crew. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you have all been noticed by Mrs. Jack Graham. She didn’t tell me where or when. She said you were honest and kind.”
“Not me,” said Ubriaco.
“You’re free to question her judgment, if you want,” said Leen. “I’m not. I have to offer you good jobs. I don’t mind doing that, though, and I’ll tell you why: She never told me to do anything that didn’t turn out to be in the best interests of the company. I used to say that I never wanted to work for anybody, but working for Mrs. Jack Graham has been the greatest privilege of my life.” He meant it.
He did not mind making us all vice-presidents. The company had seven hundred vice-presidents of this and that on the top level, the corporate level, alone. When you got out into the subsidiaries, of course, the whole business of presidents and vice-presidents started all over again.
“You know what she looks like?” Ubriaco wanted to know.
“I haven’t seen her recently,” said Leen. This was an urbane lie. He had never seen her, which was a matter of public record. He would confess to me later that he did not even know how he had come to Mrs. Graham’s attention. He thought she might have seen an article on him in the Diners Club magazine, which had featured him in their “Man on the Move” department.
In any event, he was abjectly loyal to her. He loved and feared his idea of Mrs. Graham the way Emil Larkin loved and feared his idea of Jesus Christ. He was luckier than Larkin in his worship, of course, since the invisible superior being over him called him up and wrote him letters and told him what to do.
He actually said one time, “Working for Mrs. Graham has